Britain's miles of coasts are home to some of the world's most active marine winds, making them a prime place for offshore wind power. The nation this week announced the opening of the world's largest marine wind farm installation, a monstrous 630 Megawatt, 175-turbine design dubbed "the London Array".

I. London Array is Turned On

The new farm is the latest bump for the UK, which has more installed offshore wind capacity than any other nation in the world. The UK currently gets 12 percent of its energy from renewable energy, but it hopes to expand that to 30 percent by 2020. New offshore wind installations are critical to that goal.

The new farm is located along the coastal border of Kent and Essex, to the northeast of London, facing the North Sea. It uses Siemens AG's (ETR:SIE) SWT-3.6-120 turbines [PDF] (3.6 MW), which has three blades and a diameter of 117 meters. The turbines are installed 20 kilometers (~12.4 miles) off the coast.

Here's some videos of the plans and construction of the farm and supporting substation.

The groups have petitioned to expand the installation to 870 MW, adding another 66 turbines to the current count.

II. Green Profit, But Energy Firms are Hungry for More

The new installation is a joint venture owned by Germany's E.ON SE (ETR:EOAN) (30% stake), United Arab Emirates' state-owned Masdar Abu Dhabi Future Energy Comp. (20% stake) and Danish state-owned Dong Energy A/S (50% stake). It cost a whopping €2.2B ($2.84B USD) to build, but is expected to power a half million homes for at least 30 years.

Its total annual generation is estimated by the developers to be 2.1 terawatt-hours (tWh) per year, but perhaps a more realistic metric would be 1.65 tWh, if you take the average capacity factor (29.6 percent) of UK offshore wind farms last year.

UK energy costs around 15 pence ($0.23 USD) per kWh [source], so this works out to somewhere between $379.5-483M USD in revenue per year, or roughly $11.4-14.5B USD in revenue over a 30-year lifespan. However, Prime Minister David Cameron recently announced that the government would mandate incentives to drive the revenue per kWh to three times the base rate, which would be mean over $1B USD in revenue per year.

The UK has 3.3 GW worth of installed offshore wind capacity. EON estimates the new farm will save 900,000 tons of carbon emissions per year.

While it appears to be a booming era for UK offshore wind, the manufacturers and energy companies are a bit disgruntled at the lack of longer term guarantees from the UK central government. They wanted plans to run through 2030, but only got targets for 2020.

Uranium production isn't a problem, because the supply has been shown to be effectively infinite if ore price goes up by 5-10x (it can be extracted from the sea). Such a price hike would only increase electricity price by ~0.5c/kWh.

Nuclear's main problem in the UK is that they have rather sucked at it, resulting in some of the highest prices in the world. That doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the future, but it doesn't bode well.

Given this incompetence, I can see why the UK isn't very hot on nuclear.

"If you look at the last five years, if you look at what major innovations have occurred in computing technology, every single one of them came from AMD. Not a single innovation came from Intel." -- AMD CEO Hector Ruiz in 2007